What Does Your Web Site Say About You?

This is the question that every business owner needs to be asking them selves during the current economical times. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find, secure and retain good clients. That’s why business owners need to work on their marketing a bit more to secure better clients, and this is where your website comes into the mix.

Many business owners today have the misconception that websites don’t do much, but in fact, it’s almost the complete opposite to that.

Here is a list of things that your website can convey to your customers 24/7/365;

1. Creditability
Customer testimonials are extremely important as it is one of the strongest ways to convey credibility through a website. Conveying credibility through a website is a challenge we all face. If you properly convey your credibility your visitors will be eager to contact you.

The more others speak of your past services the more likely you are to get hired. This can seriously help gain credibility and trust, which can be difficult if the client doesn’t know you.

2. Build Authority
An authority is someone who has developed specialist knowledge and because of sharing this knowledge, has developed a reputation as an expert in the field. Your website must portray an image of yourself as professional in your field. Looking professional can be done in several ways, the most important of which is customer testimonials.

Building authority is all about establishing yourself as a market leader in what you do, a pioneer if you will. The end result is that if you’re an authority and leader in your field, then you have the opportunity to get more clients, and charge more for your work as well.

3. Share your Personality
No matter what your business, if you expect to make an impact, you’ve got to create and maintain a business personality. Your website really can reveal a lot about your personality. It can really show off your sense of style, your creativity, and also your flair. A nice website can give your visitors a general picture of you as a person.

This is the question that every business owner needs to be asking them selves during the current economical times. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find, secure and retain good clients. That’s why business owners need to work on their marketing a bit more to secure better clients, and this is where your website comes into the mix.

Many business owners today have the misconception that websites don’t do much, but in fact, it’s almost the complete opposite to that.

Here is a list of things that your website can convey to your customers 24/7/365;

1. Creditability
Customer testimonials are extremely important as it is one of the strongest ways to convey credibility through a website. Conveying credibility through a website is a challenge we all face. If you properly convey your credibility your visitors will be eager to contact you.

The more others speak of your past services the more likely you are to get hired. This can seriously help gain credibility and trust, which can be difficult if the client doesn’t know you.

2. Build Authority
An authority is someone who has developed specialist knowledge and because of sharing this knowledge, has developed a reputation as an expert in the field. Your website must portray an image of yourself as professional in your field. Looking professional can be done in several ways, the most important of which is customer testimonials.

Building authority is all about establishing yourself as a market leader in what you do, a pioneer if you will. The end result is that if you’re an authority and leader in your field, then you have the opportunity to get more clients, and charge more for your work as well.

3. Share your Personality
No matter what your business, if you expect to make an impact, you’ve got to create and maintain a business personality. Your website really can reveal a lot about your personality. It can really show off your sense of style, your creativity, and also your flair. A nice website can give your visitors a general picture of you as a person.

Is your site unorganized? Is it cluttered or over packed with info? Does your website read like a face to face conversation or an encyclopedia? Is your color scheme loud or relaxing? These are some of the questions you should ask yourself.

4. Know Your Clients
There are many things to be learned by getting to know your customer. We all would love to strap our customers to a chair and ask them a 100 questions about why they do business with us. But, this would not be good for repeat business. And we can't necessarily find out what people want by asking them directly. We therefore as business owners we need to do a lot of observation.

Through your website you can observe your customers through email, chat, blogs, surveys, polls, web traffic and page views. These are just some of the tools that are available to you. Once you have this knowledge, you can use it to persuade potential and existing customers that buying from you is in their best interests.

Virgil Griffin, editor
All About Small Business

Feel free to explore some of the best articles that I have written here and they have made good money for me. You can also join our fan page on facebook.

Google Startup Kits - Scammed me twice.

Google Startup Kits - Scammed me twice.

DO NOT GET SUCKERED

I feel like such an idiot right now that I had to share this experence with you with the hope that you do not fall for the same scam. I'm talking about the sites and blogs out their that you can make thousands by posting Google ads.

My name is virgil, and I'm a web designer by profession. l do most of my marketing off-line. I recently decided to get serious about my online marketing and capitalize on my knowledge (or lack there of in this case) by putting more effort into social marketing or reationship marketing. In order to do this I ave been writing a lot of original content, reading blogs, and posting to forums.

So, this morning I run across an hub page that is titled something like college drop out makes $9000 a month posting links for google. Now i'm not a fool and i understand that 99% of ads over embellish their products. But my thinking was, they are only asking for $1.97. That is not much and if it is Bull ****, it was $1.97 worth of internet tuition.

So, it was a great ad copy, so much so that I did not do any do diligence. I read the complete ad and pulled out my PayPal card. You guessed it. Here comes the Bull. You are probably asking why I am so pissed.

This is why. I am no newbie to the internet and when it comes to risk I keep it at a minimal. n this particuar situation, when I submmited my payment info I received an error message telling me that I had entered in the wrong 3 digit verification code. So I tried again and again, about three times. STILL BEING MOTIVATED, I pulled out my other PayPal account card,( i have differnt accounts for differnet online businesses) and proceeded to process the purchase again only to recieve the same message. "you have entered an invalid code". So at this point i'm like screw it.

Then the bells went off. I decided to check my account, the first one I used. And sure enough there was a charge for $1.97. So immediately I switched accounts. And wouldn't you know it, another $1.97. So i'm pissed and embarrassed at my stupidity. What I should have done is what Kellysgirl did(Google Start-up Kits – IT’S A SCAM).

So now i have to did with PayPal, and if you do not know that can be a process. So PLEASE LEARN FROM MY HASTE. Do your home work first. Glen wrote a good article " 10 ways not to get scammed online ".

I hope this real story has enlightened you. I did not write this article to enhance your fears about online transactions. I wrote it as good advice.

Virgil Griffin, editor
All About Small Business

Feel free to explore some of the best articles (hubs) that I have written here and they have made good money for me.I have a blog named "All About Small Business" that offers free tips on making money online. You can also join our fan page on facebook.

Reactions to Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Reactions to Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Google Startup Kits - Scammed me twice

DO NOT GET SUCKERED

I feel like such an idiot right now that I had to share this experence with you with the hope that you do not fall for the same scam. I'm talking about the sites and blogs out their that you can make thousands by posting Google ads.

My name is virgil, and I'm a web designer by profession. l do most of my marketing off-line. I recently decided to get serious about my online marketing and capitalize on my knowledge (or lack there of in this case) by putting more effort into social marketing or reationship marketing. In order to do this I ave been writing a lot of original content, reading blogs, and posting to forums.

So, this morning I run across an hub page that is titled something like college drop out makes $9000 a month posting links for google. Now i'm not a fool and i understand that 99% of ads over embellish their products. But my thinking was, they are only asking for $1.97. That is not much and if it is Bull ****, it was $1.97 worth of internet tuition.

So, it was a great ad copy, so much so that I did not do any do diligence. I read the complete ad and pulled out my PayPal card. You guessed it. Here comes the Bull. You are probably asking why I am so pissed.

This is why. I am no newbie to the internet and when it comes to risk I keep it at a minimal. n this particuar situation, when I submmited my payment info I received an error message telling me that I had entered in the wrong 3 digit verification code. So I tried again and again, about three times. STILL BEING MOTIVATED, I pulled out my other PayPal account card,( i have differnt accounts for differnet online businesses) and proceeded to process the purchase again only to recieve the same message. "you have entered an invalid code". So at this point i'm like screw it.

Then the bells went off. I decided to check my account, the first one I used. And sure enough there was a charge for $1.97. So immediately I switched accounts. And wouldn't you know it, another $1.97. So i'm pissed and embarrassed at my stupidity. What I should have done is what Kellysgirl did(Google Start-up Kits – IT’S A SCAM).

So now i have to did with PayPal, and if you do not know that can be a process. So PLEASE LEARN FROM MY HASTE. Do your home work first. Glen wrote a good article " 10 ways not to get scammed online ".

I hope this real story has enlightened you. I did not write this article to enhance your fears about online transactions. I wrote it as good advice.

Virgil Griffin, editor
All About Small Business

Feel free to explore some of the best articles (hubs) that I have written here and they have made good money for me.I have a blog named "All About Small Business" that offers free tips on making money online. You can also jion our fan page on facebook.

5 Steps to a PROFITABLE BLOG

Blogging Tips

Want To Get Started Making Money Online But Unsure If It Is Profitable Or Not? You can get just about any kind of blogging advice from anyone out there. Ten Rules for Profitable Blog Startups ( by Darren Rowse) is a great place to start. This is a valuable set of 10 blogging tips that will be of interest regardless of whether you are a Pro Blogger or an aspiring Pro Blogger.

1. Keyword research

If you have created a blog and are interested in drawing large amounts of traffic to it to make it a profitable blog, it is absolutely essential that you engage in keyword research. Selecting the proper keywords can be considered the most important step to profitable blogging. there are some easily accessible tools to help you determine the best keywords to use. I have found a key word research tool for you to use to help you out. With Google's AdWords Keyword Tool you can find out how often people search for particular terms and see what may be most relevant to the subject of your blog.

If you spend the time it takes on keyword research, carefully building your list, the rest of your SEO efforts will come together much more smoothly and your results will be immeasurably better.


2. Purchase a domain name and setup hosting account

Domain names are generally not expensive - $10 or so for a typical name.

* Web hosting provider - GBN-Hosting
GBN - Top rated web hosting provider

3. Add content to your site.

This part will depend on the sort of content you are providing. It may well just be text, but you might also have chosen to include photo galleries or video-blogging as your theme or niche. It may also be that you just add content once and leave it, or you may have gone another route and be adding content all the time.

4. Create backlinks

Backlink building is a bit like drug taking in professional sports. Everyone else is doing it so you have to as well. In a perfect world, the best-written content would naturally generate the most incoming links and all my pages would be the highest ranked pages on any given subject.

5. Rinse and repeat

No kidding - once you find a profitable niche and/or approach - do it again. And keep doing it until you find a more profitable approach.


Virgil Griffin, CEO
GBN Web Development, Inc.
708-359-0701

What Marketing Works Best In Recession Times

Even with tough times as what we are experiencing right now, marketing should not be put in the back burner just so you can save in your budget.

This is the hard fact: you need to market in order for your business to survive in these trying times. This is precisely the right time for you to double your marketing efforts especially when everybody seems to be thinking the same thing – that of trying to cut back on promotional campaigns in order to save on costs.

There is one reasonable and practical way of marketing that will not need for you to break the bank just so you can promote adequately. What marketing strategy will work in these tough times?

for tI believe it is important for business owners to review what has worked for them in the past and refine it. Often times we as business owners neglect what has worked steadily in the past for the new fad. Everyone is into social media craze now.

Yes this is good to be up to date. But it is still important to network, pass out business cards, shake hands, look a prospect in the eye.

You think?

Mrvegriff, CEO
GBN Web Development, Inc.

Are People Making Money Online?

can you make money online

Today it’s quite difficult to keep track of the many different business opportunities that are popping up here and there. It seems every tom, dick and harry is trying to make money on the internet. But if you stick with the time tested ones you will have a easier start. The best thing about making money online is that once you've done enough up-front work, it will be easy to continue.

Truth be told, 98% of people who try making money online will not, and most of the 2% that does make money will do so by selling useless advice or products to the 98% that failed. There is no easy money to be had online. If you think there is, you are going to fail. I spend an average of 60 hours of week online, researching, writing, marketing. And then I spend another 15 hours servicing the clients that the first 60 hours earned me. Now before your mouth drops. please understand, it use to be worse. But the ultimate goal is for it to be reversed. Then I'll spend more time servicing my customer and less marketing to them.

The main thing you have to understand about Internet is it is just a communications medium. It's an opportunity to discover people interests and problems. Then to solve them and earn an income from solving their problems. A lot of people who are looking to make money online may choose to do so by blogging. You are able to literally make money from a variety of income sources when you decide to earn money online by blogging. The reason that blogging can be so popular is simply because it's so versatile. The direction you choose will partly depend on your skills and interests.

If you decide to start your own blog, there is one rule you need to commit to. CONTENT IS KING; This is a very common expression in the online world. Content means just that – the content of your web site or blog – words, videos, music clips, whatever. If you do good research on a subject and write witty, informative work that people enjoy reading and linking to you will soon start making money online with your blog.

Marking Money Through Adsense
Adsense is a big part of a lot of bloggers income. There is really little doubting that there are amazing incomes currently being made on Google Adsense and the really interesting thing is that even relatively small sites and blogs are finding new ways to make money from their Adsense sites every day.

Making Money Through Paid Posting
If you do paid posting, paid forum posters don't make great sums of money, but they are paid for doing something they already enjoy. If you enjoy browsing through and participating in topics that interest you in various forums, perhaps its time you looked into paid forum posting.

There are two primary ways to be paid through forum posting, and sometimes they overlap.1. Building up New Forums: Many webmasters start a forum and then need to make the forum appear active to attract more visitors. These webmasters seek out individuals with knowledge on their particular topic and pay for each post the individual makes. 2. Marketing through Forums:The other method of forum posting is to help promote and market web sites in relevant forums. If you participate a great deal in particular forums, you can sell your services or a spot in your signature to those who are looking for extra publicity in that market.

Making Money Through Affiliate Links
You can also make money through affiliate links. Marketing and selling someone else's product through a link is affiliate marketing. The seller, called the affiliate, signs up with a company such as eBay, Amazon or and of the thousands of companies and individuals that have affiliate marketing networks in place. The affiliate is then given links to sell the product and may be given banner ads and other promotional items that will help them to make sales

This does not cover all of the ways to Making money online, but it does cover a lot of the more profitable ones for beginners to make money online. Blogging is not the only way to make money online, but it is one of the easiest, cheapest and popular ways of doing so.

There is nothing easy about making money online, but with hard work, patience and an understanding of the business you can make some nice money on the internet. Don't focus on make money initially. Focus on the value of what you have to offer, whom you will offer it to. To summarize, the key to earning money online is to stay enthused and dedicated.



Virgil Griffin, CEO
GBN Web Development, Inc.
708-359-0701